Willing to Pay More For Nutritional Labelling?

November 23, 2009

Santiago de Compostela is more renowned as a centre of pilgrimage, but it seems they also have a University that is interested in studying food and nutrition.

They recently looked at the labelling of breakfast biscuits and found that people would be willing to pay more for products that carry more detailed nutritional information. Apparently consumers are willing to pay a premium price for products labelled ‘light’ – usually a euphemism for containing sweeteners in my experience – and apparently will pay more for good labelling. The product chosen for analysis was the breakfast biscuit owing to its popularity in Spain, and it’s high fat content, to see if consumers were concerned about what they were eating.

Older readers may remember the breakfast biscuit produced by Huntley and Palmers, and in Georgian times it was not uncommon to have sweet biscuits and tea as the first item of the day, but now we eat chewy cereal bars instead. These are not always as healthy as they seem as they often contain high amounts of fat and sugar, but if the Spanish experiment can encourage manufacturers to be even more forthcoming about their nutritional labelling I am all for it.